


Under Siege

by Setcheti



Series: Tremors: the Subtext [10]
Category: Tremors: The Series
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 23:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things are tense in Perfection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under Siege

Larry was concentrating on the display he was arranging when Rosalita came in, and even though he knew she’d seen him he didn’t say hello the way he normally would have – although he did greet Nancy when she came in on the other woman’s heels. He waved a hand at the display when she walked over to him, a special arrangement of her work that he hoped would encourage souvenir shoppers to purchase more of the higher-priced pieces instead of just the smaller, cheaper ones. “See? I’m hoping that with the more detailed pieces in front, people will see the little ones as knockoffs.”

The sculptor raised an eyebrow, but the look she gave him was more fond than exasperated. “The little ones _are_ knockoffs of the big ones, Larry.”

He grinned and didn’t quite bounce. “The customers don’t know that. It’s all in the presentation.”

Nancy laughed and ruffled his hair. “It looks nice. But since you’re done, I think there are some other things we need to take care of.” She jerked her head in the direction of the counter, where Rosalita was talking to Jodi. “You can’t keep avoiding each other forever.”

Larry folded his arms, but although the gesture looked stubborn his expression gave it away as more insecure than anything else. “Agent Twitchell said all we had to be was civil. And Burt said whatever I had to do to stay civil was okay, just so long as it didn’t interfere with all of us working together if something happened. I’m trying, Nancy.” His light blue eyes glanced over in the other two women’s direction but then just as quickly slid away again. “I just can’t…I keep hearing it. I’m sorry.”

Nancy sighed. She knew he was trying, and she had to admit that Rosalita hadn’t exactly met him halfway. The Hispanic woman had apologized to Larry, but then she’d obviously expected him to give her the whole story without being asked and when he hadn’t the making-up process had pretty much stalled out between them. And civil _was_ working, for the moment. “Okay,” she told him, dredging up a smile. “I won’t push you any more.”

Larry’s grin came back, fainter and a little lopsided but still there. “Yeah, you will. But that’s okay too.” He gave her an impulsive hug. “Now I’d better go do my patrol, I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Be careful.” She watched him go, seeing some trying in evidence when he waved goodbye to Jodi instead of calling out to her like he normally would, thereby not entirely excluding Rosalita while still avoiding the need to talk to her directly. She sighed again and took another look at the display – perfectly arranged, with her best and biggest figure of Burt right in the center. _I need to do one of Tyler_ , she thought, stroking one finger thoughtfully down the side of the action figure’s khaki sleeve. _Maybe I could pose them together; Batman and Robin, like Twitchell is always teasing them about. I won’t put it that way to them, though._

Leaving the display, she wandered back over to the counter and accepted the steaming cup of Grabuccino Jodi had waiting for her. After the first sip she raised an eyebrow. “I added a little more cinnamon,” the storekeeper told her before she could ask. “And a few other things too. What do you think of calling this blend Spiced Grabuccino?”

“I like it.” Nancy sipped again. “It has a…winterish kind of flavor now, it makes me think of snowy days.”

“Like we’re ever going to get snow out here.” Rosalita snorted. She gestured at the door. “So where was he off to?”

Her tone said she assumed Larry had only left to get away from her, and Nancy frowned. “He’s going on patrol,” she told the younger woman. “Burt and Tyler can’t cover everything by themselves, and Larry knows the nearby areas as well as anyone does.” Another sip of Grabuccino, letting the spiced liquid roll over her tongue and wash away the lecture that wanted to come out. Not that it would have done any good if it had. “And he told Burt he’s still got his tag-along, so between that and his gun he should be okay.”

Rosalita’s eyes widened. “Larry’s got a _gun_?”

“Burt gave it to him.” Jodi shrugged; the survivalist had given her a gun just like it, a lightweight semi-automatic whose quick scatter of bullets made good aim unnecessary for a novice shooter. “You didn’t think he’d let Larry go out there unarmed, did you? His invisible bat isn’t that big, the most it can do is give him a warning.” Her brown eyes narrowed when it looked like the other woman wanted to make some comment about that. “Don’t you say it, Rosalita, he’s not crazy; Cletus confirmed that there’s something following Larry around, he thinks it might have imprinted on him right after it hatched, like the geese in that one movie.”

“And it’s not hurting anything, so Burt refuses to even try to kill it.” Burt was mainly refusing because Tyler wouldn’t like it, in Nancy’s opinion, but that wasn’t an opinion she was going to share. Burt being less trigger-happy wasn’t a bad thing as far as she was concerned. “It’s there, Rosalita, Larry still has the video he first spotted it on.”

Rosalita wasn’t convinced. “What does Casey say?”

“Casey wants one to study, but since she can’t have Larry’s she’s willing to wait until another one shows up.” Nancy lifted an eyebrow at the younger woman’s surprised look. “What, you thought she’d try to catch _his_ and dissect it?”

“She and Roger wouldn’t do that to Larry,” Jodi chimed in. She sighed and shook her head. “Really, Rosalita, you’re just going to have to get over it. Just because you misjudged him…”

“I did not misjudge him! If he doesn’t have the _cajones_ to stand up and tell me what’s going on…”

“He doesn’t _have_ to tell you what’s going on, it’s his business and he doesn’t have to share it with you if he doesn’t feel like it,” Nancy interrupted her tiredly. Round and round, they’d been doing this for weeks and she was getting sick of it. Only the fact that the young Hispanic woman had been kept close to her struggling ranch by her need to protect her stock had kept things from coming to a head before now. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; why don’t you just ask him?”

Rosalita retreated from that into a folded-arms pout. “He won’t tell me.”

“You don’t know whether he’ll tell you or not, you haven’t asked.” Nancy swirled her drink around in its cup, mixing in the spice she knew was settling to the bottom. Maybe if Jodi tried cinnamon extract… “Rosalita, did you really think just saying you were sorry was going to be _enough_? You brought up some really bad memories for Larry with the way you reacted to Tyler, he’s not going to be able to just forget about it.” She raised her hand to cut off the inevitable question. “If you want to know why it bothered him so much, ask _him_. Or let it go. Because we’ve got more important things to worry about right now, don’t you agree?”

“I…I guess so.” It was Rosalita’s turn to sigh. The uncaught flying killers, whatever they were, had turned Perfection into a town under siege. Burt and Tyler had started staying on patrol closer and closer to dusk in hopes of at least spotting one of the monsters, and from what she’d heard they also had night-vision cameras planted around that they monitored once the sun went down. But so far no bait they’d offered had produced results, although more livestock in the valley had died in the meantime; the general consensus was that the monsters could smell the scent of humans and steered clear of it. Nobody was banking on that, though. “Have there been any more…”

“Not last night, no – at least, not that anyone’s found yet.” Jodi took Rosalita’s empty cup and frowned at the spice-laden sediment left in the bottom before throwing it away. “Some of the ranchers were in here this morning, but all they had to complain about was Burt not doing night patrols.”

Nancy snorted. “Don’t tell him that…” She trailed off at the look on Jodi’s face. “He was in here?”

Jodi nodded. “He told them he’d ‘take it under advisement’ – and then he suggested that maybe they should camp out in the sheep pens for the rest of the week to try to spot the thing for him, since they were so sure it didn’t eat people. They pretty much shut up after that.”

“I bet they did.” Nancy didn’t smile, though. She doubted Jodi or the ranchers had realized it, but Burt hadn’t said he _wouldn’t_ start doing night patrols; it wasn’t out of character for him to respond to that kind of goading by doing exactly what it was he’d been goaded to do, albeit in his own way and his own time. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if he was considering it.”

“That would be stupid, when we don’t even know what these things look like.” Rosalita dismissed the whole idea with a wave of her hand. “I mean, I’d like to have them gone as much as anybody, but not if it means getting someone killed to catch one.”

Nancy took this as a good sign; a couple of weeks ago Rosalita probably would have been suggesting that Burt and Tyler – with emphasis on Tyler – should be out nights ridding the valley of monsters in spite of the risk. “I’d have to agree,” she said, with a small smile for the younger woman. “The government will make good on the sheep, since it’s a mutated something killing them. But they can’t compensate us for losing Burt.”

 

Tyler had made the same point just half an hour earlier when his lover had proposed giving a night patrol a try. He’d made it more passionately and definitely more loudly, and he’d still been making it when the truck had crested the top of a rocky hill overlooking a lonely stretch of open range and exposed the slashed remains of a steer sprawled out grotesquely only a dozen feet away…and just within the range of a blinking tripod-mounted camera. Luckily the motion-activated camera had been facing away from them, since Burt’s triumphant method of reassuring Tyler at that point had been non-verbal but every bit as passionate.

Casey all but pounced on the camera when they brought it in, and by the time Larry was starting his patrol Roger had gone for Cletus and everyone left at the lab was crowded around a table filled with printouts of blown-up screen captures from the footage. The pictures were blurry, but some elements came through clearly: long, curved talons, a snapping hooked beak, wide leathery wings. “It looks kind of like a pterodactyl,” Tyler said, moving the beak picture above the talons and tilting it to a better angle. “Could this be another prehistoric thing like that shrimp was?”

Burt contained his shudder at the thought of the giant shrimp; that particular monster had almost cost him his partner, in more ways than one. But Casey was shaking her head. “No, pterodactyls didn’t have beaks – and _that_ ,” she pointed, grimacing, at a shot graphic with dangling entrails in spite of motion-blur, “is definitely a beak. It might have teeth in there too, but they’d be very small, like a duck’s. It’s the claws could be reptilian, I think, although over here,” she dragged over a different picture, “they look more like the talons you’d see on a bird of prey. And those wings are definitely from a bat, but what I can see of the feet looks like a mammal, maybe the coyote DNA we found. Frankly, I’m amazed even Mixmaster could keep this thing alive with all the different species crowded together in there.”

“Not only alive, but hungry,” Burt commented. “These pictures aren’t showing me anything that will make this monster easier to kill.”

“But they are showing us what to watch out for when we go after it,” Tyler contradicted. He tapped the beak picture. “It grabs its prey with its claws first, then uses its beak to tear it up – so it doesn’t peck at stuff like a chicken.”

“Which could mean the neck is weak and most of its strength is in its body.” Casey was nodding. “It lands on the prey, uses its talons to hold and its weight to pin the animal down, then goes after the vital organs first – maybe to stop the prey struggling so it can be carried away.”

“Or maybe because it likes the entrails best. Plenty of animals like their food still kicking.” Burt still wasn’t happy. “And even if this thing’s neck is weak, a human is a lot more thin-skinned than a leather-hided steer. Perfection is still under siege.”

The survivalist stomped out of the lab, and Tyler sighed. “He’s got a point.”

“I know.” Casey sat down on one of the tall lab stools and sighed herself. “There’s a very good possibility that if this creature ever does get hold of a person, it will decide very quickly that we’re easier prey. And then it will become a man-hunter.”

“I guess we’ll just have to kill it before that happens, then.” Tyler gave her a half-smile and a shrug. “I’m gonna go see if Burt has any ideas, we’ll let you know.”

Casey waved him out, but after a moment she stood up and moved to the lab’s window, looking out. Burt was leaning against the side of his truck and Tyler was standing in front of him, his gestures telling her he was indicating that the lights mounted atop the truck were angled wrong for spotlighting a flying monster. Burt was nodding, but then he said something that drained all the animation out of his partner like a plug had been pulled, and after a moment’s hesitation Tyler returned the nod and then turned away, wrapping his arms around his chest and scuffing at the dirt with his boot. The older man visibly sighed, then closed the distance between them and placed a hand on Tyler’s shoulder, saying something else very earnestly. Tyler didn’t look up at first, but then the former NASCAR driver slanted a very intense blue look up into his partner’s face and made an earnest reply of his own. Casey saw Burt’s hand tighten on Tyler’s shoulder, he nodded…and then they separated, got into the truck and drove away.

Going back to her stool, Casey looked over the photos again, but this time the blur was partly in her eyes. She didn’t need to have heard the exchange between the two men outside to know what they’d been talking about, or why Tyler had been so upset. Perfection’s protector had decided they couldn’t wait any longer to break the siege, couldn’t take the chance that their barely-identified predator would discover there was easier prey to be had in the valley than wandering livestock.

Burt and Tyler were going hunting. _Night_ hunting.


End file.
